Opening Thoughts
But when the perpetrator is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, is she culpable?
And if the victim is her thirty-four-year-old teacher, shouldn’t he have known better?
When the nameless young narrator of Innocents decides to seduce her teacher, she immediately realizes that the power of her sexuality is greater than she ever imagined. She leaves the aunt and uncle who are her guardians and moves in with her teacher; together, they quickly embark on a journey into their darkest desires. Unforgettable, disturbing, and morally complex, Innocents permanently unsettles our notions of innocence, experience, and power, and suggests that we all are culpable.
What I Thought
This isn’t a book about a nymphet playing at being a femme fatale. It’s about a young girl who is so powerless that she creates elaborate fantasies about how she is the one in control. If she’s in control, she can’t be hurt. If she’s in control, then no one can disappoint her or let her down. She’ll take all responsibility, all blame, as long as it means she can deny the reality of her life, and how vulnerable she is.
The prose further reinforces this; alternatingly stilted and flowery, saccharine and cloying. It is the writing of someone trying to project an image of maturity and confidence that reads as a clunky imitation of authenticity.
To take it at face value robs the reader of the deeper well of vulnerability and fear that the protagonist is desperate to deny. She’s in need of someone who will take care of her, while giving her the illusion of her own feminine power.
Her sketches, while sexual in nature, were not sexual fantasies. In fact, the character seemed nearly entirely asexual in desire, and her obsession with sexual dominance was a transmogrification of her need to feel in control. She easily offered up submission when she was able to learn that she could feel just as in control in that manufactured vulnerability and childishness. It was desperate, naïve attempts at getting her needs of receiving love, protection, and care met, while not offering up the truth of her own loneliness and fear.
It reminds me of that Wilde quote, “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”
The intention of the storytelling becomes clear in the final acts.
Spoilers
M. Keep
Author
Very well put!
It jumped off the page to me immediately, how clear it was that this is a neglected, powerless teenager, desperate for some facsimile of love, affection and control over her world. She’s not the femme fatale she wishes she were, she’s just a child desperately trying to get what she needs, as no adult has ever given it to her. And sadly, the best way she’s found is via her sex appeal to a man with a twisted desire.
I think the blurb and the subject matter and the perspective sets the reader up to accept the narrative as truth when that really robs it of a much more nuanced and complex understanding!